How Few Days Make Up A Century
by Assimbya
Summary: Tracing the life story of the novel's titular character, from his mortal life as the infamous Vlad Tepes of Wallachia to his immortal one as the equally infamous Count Dracula.
1. Initiation

_1436, Tirgoviste, Wallachia_

The room was small, not at all the sort of expansive throne room that would have impressed any visitor, whether enemy or ally. In fact, it was so small that it barely held all the members of the Order of the Dragon and their families. As the boy looked up at the unfamiliar figures crowded about him, all he noticed about them was the identical silver medallion, signifying membership in the Order, that each of them wore around their necks. He knew well the image of a dragon embracing a cross, which was stamped on each medallion; his father had often, proudly, shown his to the boy, explaining what the symbols meant.

There were a few faces he recognized, however, among the tall figures with their rich clothes and silver medallions. There was his father, dark beard neatly trimmed for the occasion, his dark eyes half watching the boy – whose name was Vlad – and half critically observing the others in the room for any sign of discontent or secrecy. Beside him stood Mircea, Vlad's older brother, holding his own, brand new, silver medallion and grinning, trying to catch Vlad's eye. In another part of the room, Vlad's mother sat, perfectly composed, her glossy hair held up by a net of gold and small gems. Beside her stood the nurse, carrying Radu, Vlad's younger brother, who was, for once, not kicking and screaming.

But Vlad had to stop looking around the room then, for the bishop in front of him was beginning to speak. His voice was strong and steady, nothing like the quavering voice of the priest he was used to. Vlad thought that he would listen more carefully to sermons if they were given by this bishop. "Do you swear to always remain a member of the Holy Roman Church, and to, for all your life, abide by its rules?"

Vlad, who had been carefully taught what to do on this night, said, "Yes."

"Do you swear to do all in your power to aid the Holy Roman Church, donating as much as you are able to its churches and monasteries?"

"Yes."

"Do you swear to eradicate heathenism where you find it, to tolerate no breach of the laws of the Holy Roman Church?"

"Yes."

The bishop lifted the last of the new silver medallions, hung on a fine cord of leather, and placed it around Vlad's neck. It was far less heavy than he had expected it to be – it was only made of a thin layer of silver. He wanted to touch it, to feel the indentations of the designs beneath his fingers, but he had been admonished to fidget that night, so he didn't move.

"I pronounce you, Vladislav, son of Vlad Dracul, a member of the Order of the Dragon, committed to the protection of the Holy Roman Church and all her works."

The bishop dipped his fingers into the small bowl of holy water and, with his first two fingers, drew a cross in holy water on Vlad's forehead. The water was uncomfortably cold against his skin, but Vlad didn't react.

Normally, none of the brothers would have gone to one of father's banquets, even Mircea, who was seven, but it had been Vlad and Mircea's initiation, after all, and father was eager to show off his sons now that his throne was finally secure. He had successors, three of them, and, Vlad Dracul wasn't about to let anyone forget that fact.

So Vlad found himself at a banquet, closer in the day to when he normally went to sleep to when he ate dinner, and already tired from the hours of formal ceremony which had taken place before he and Mircea had finally received their medallions. The room was overwarm, heated by blazing fire near the head of the table, one unnecessary for the time of year. But he was determined, in defiance of the dizzying warmth of the fire, not to fall asleep, both because father would think him babyish and because this might be his only chance in a long time to see so many warriors and nobleman from so many different places.

Mircea didn't seem tired at all, remarkably. He talked to practically every guest seated near him, charming them all with his enthusiasm for their stories of battle or horsemanship. "What an enchanting little boy," the lady seated across from Vlad and Mircea, said to father, her smile seeming as painted on as the roses in her cheeks, which even Vlad could tell were from powder, "and he looks just like you!"

Father smiled benevolently. "That's Mircea, my eldest. Mircea is named after his grandfather, my father."

Vlad thought that father's explanation was a bit unnecessary. After all, who hadn't heard of Mircea the Elder?

"And you'll be as great a warrior as he is, I'm sure," said the man sitting with the lady. Vlad noticed that his hands, currently occupied with cutting up his meat, looked so soft that the man surely could never have been to battle himself.

Mircea nodded enthusiastically. "I hope so!"

The adults laughed. Then, they turned their attention to Vlad, who said nothing, and certainly nothing enchanting. "And this is your youngest?" The man asked father uncertainly.

"Vlad is my middle son," father answered, "I have another, Radu, just born last year."

"How great a prince you must be," said a man who hadn't spoken yet, a wheedling edge to his voice that Vlad would one day recognize as flattery, "to just have been crowned voivode and to already have three strong sons to defend your throne!"

A satisfied smile appeared on father's face, though it looked a little as though he was trying to hide it. For the first time, Vlad had a moment of contempt for his father. How could he believe the wheedling man, let alone take his compliments to heart? "God has indeed blessed me," he said, his right hand self consciously going to the medallion around his neck, "to give me such a beautiful wife and so many sons."

"Oh, where is the princess tonight?" the woman who had previously spoken asked, "I saw her at the ceremony, and hoped to be able to speak with her now. Is she feeling well?"

There was a note of brief uncertainty in father's voice, but one that was quickly quelled. "Cneajna was tired tonight, and decided not to join us for the banquet. But she sends her warmest regards to all of you."

Vlad looked down at his almost untouched plate of food. Mother didn't approve of banquets. They made her head ache and were manifestations of excess and gluttony. Whenever father talked of her coming to one, mother quoted verses from the Bible and took to her room, sometimes with Radu. Since Vlad had never been to one of the banquets before, he didn't know whether father said that mother was tired every time. It seemed likely. The noblemen must all think that she was the most sickly woman in the land.

"Now that you are _v_oivode of Wallachia," a man dressed still in the worn clothing of a battlefield began, leaning in close towards father, so that the nearest candle cast a flickering light on his face, "when will you begin your campaign against the Turks? They are the Order's greatest enemy, intending to spread their heathen religion beyond their own borders."

Father took a sip of wine. "God will make it clear when the time is right," he said, clearly ending the conversation in every way that mattered.

But the man seemed to be unused to taking hints, even such obvious ones. "The news of their atrocities grows each day," he continued, his voice low with vehement passion, "and the people will look to you for protection. If you do not do your duty to them, then it will soon be Sultan Murad II who we call voivode, not you, my lord!"

Father's fists were clenched, Vlad noticed, and he sounded as though he spoke through gritted teeth. "I assure you, while I live, the Turks will have no power or influence here."

Finally, the man seemed to realize that he had gone too far. With a respectful nod, he went back to his food.

Vlad wanted to turn to Mircea and ask him in a whisper why father didn't order the man punished, but he had the feeling that Mircea didn't know the answer anymore than he did. Neither did he think that Mircea would be able to tell him about the 'atrocities' that the Turks were doing. No one seemed to actually describe those, only mention those in hushed whispers when it didn't seem as though Vlad or Mircea were listening.

Well. If no one was ever going to tell him about those things, then Vlad would simply have to find out for himself. Even at five, it already seemed clear to him that no one ever actually meant what they said.


	2. An Ordinary Family

_1440, Tirgoviste, Wallachia_

There was a clanging of metal against metal, and the sun glinted off the dull iron of the practice swords for a long moment until Mircea, with a sudden surge of strength, pushed Vlad's blade down. For a few seconds, there was such intense focus between them that they looked many times their ages, as they strung together the thrust and parry movements they had been learning for years into a rough approximation of hand to hand combat, albeit one rather lacking in grace.

Then the moment was broken as Mircea broke out laughing, suddenly aware of how absurd such intense concentration looked on the face of nine year old Vlad. It took another moment, but Vlad soon started laughing too, though not as heartily as his brother.

"Why don't you come join us?" Mircea called out to Radu, who was sitting on the edge of the area that Vlad and Mircea had designated as their practice area, watching intently.

Radu shook his head. "I'm too little to fight with you," he explained. Being too little was Radu's favorite defense for getting out of things, and it very often worked, as Radu had only just turned six and was a good many inches shorter than Vlad.

"I'll go easy on you," Mircea promised, "I'll even use one of those wooden swords that you're always using. You know, you're never going to get any good at fighting if you never practice with someone better than you."

"But I don't _want _to get good at fighting," Radu protested, his voice a whine, "It's boring and sweaty and messy. I want to be a minstrel, and travel around and sing at all the different courts."

Vlad laughed, perhaps a little cruelly, but not intentionally so. "A minstrel! Radu, father would never let you travel around being a _minstrel _when there are still Turks around. You'll need to become a good fighter first, and then maybe you'll get to be a minstrel later."

"When I'm voivode," Mircea began gallantly, "you can be our court minstrel, and you'll sing at all the banquets –"

Just then, the town clock chimed, and all three boys nearly jumped with the sudden sound. "It's time for lessons," Vlad observed calmly.

Mircea sighed overdramatically. "It's easy for you to talk about it – you're the one who has an unholy talent for all those wretched languages that we keep having to learn."

Vlad liked the languages; he liked hearing how they all sounded so different and imagining what it would be like to speak one all the time that wasn't Romanian. He didn't even mind learning Turkish, for all that he didn't understand why father insisted that they do so (he had said something about it being useful in their current political climate, which hadn't made much sense to Vlad). It sounded just as interesting as all the others, even if the people who spoke it were the enemies of Wallachia. And learning it made him feel almost as though he understood the Turks better, as though he was somehow able to see the way the thought from the words they said. But he didn't say any of that to Mircea, who he didn't think would really understand. Instead, he just said, "They're not that difficult."

Mircea snorted. "So you say."

Radu was nervously shifting from one foot to another. "We'll be _late."_

A grin broke over Mircea's face. "I'll race you to the schoolroom!" he cried out, and before Vlad could stop him to ask "Why?", Mircea was sprinting across the courtyard and throwing open the door to get inside, looking as though he would carry the sunshine itself into the dark corridors of the castle.

Vlad didn't take off after him, because that would mean leaving Radu behind, and Radu tended to get lost when left behind, even if he was going somewhere he went to all the time. So, when Vlad and Radu got to the schoolroom, quite a while after Mircea did but significantly less out of breath, their older brother really had nothing to gloat about, as there was no point in gloating about something if the other person didn't even try to win. And, besides, it didn't even matter when they got there, as it turned out that their tutor wasn't there anyway – sick with something, apparently.

In their tutor's place, Radu's nurse (Vlad and especially Mircea were too old to need one) would be watching them for that time, and making sure that they read the passages that they were supposed to – which, for Vlad, was a section of a book about the military history of the Greeks. Vlad didn't really like Radu's nurse, who was a self satisfied and gossipy woman, but he easily immersed himself in the stories of Pericles' victories, ignoring both Radu and Mircea's whispered games, which seemed to involve words that sounded like other words, and the conversation between Radu's nurse and one of mother's handmaidens, taking place over embroidery.

Until, that is, the conversation between the adults began to get more hushed, and thus far more interested. He didn't betray his sudden interest though – he had grown quite good at eavesdropping, and that was not the way to do it.

"Did you hear about that Frenchman – Gilles de Rais, I think it was, one of those strange names that they have over there…the one who…?" The question trailed off into silence, as though Radu's nurse was nervous to discuss it.

There was a gasp from the handmaid merely at the name. "The one who murdered all those children? Oh, yes, it's so terrible – I can't believe a person would be capable of things like that…little boys they were too, all blond and blue-eyed like little angels."

The nurse nodded, a fixed expression of horror and sympathy on her face. "Hundreds, I heard he killed, _hundreds. _And I heard –" her voice dropped lower, both cautiously and for effect, "that he then set their heads up, just to look at them."

The handmaid crossed herself. "God protect us from such."

If they said anything after that, Vlad didn't hear it, as Mircea leaned over to him, asking in a loud whisper, "Vlad, do you know what this word means?" And Vlad obediently looked at the passage Mircea indicated and told Mircea what the word meant, though he was a little disappointed that he hadn't gotten to hear any more about the Frenchman who killed the hundreds of little boys.

For it seemed that no one else around him was actually talking about such things honestly. They would talk about the number of soldiers killed in one battle or another, and they would mention executions and the Turks killing people, but no one ever mentioned exactly what any of those things would entail, or what made two of them all right but the third one not so.

In the family priest's sermons, he would talk about killing being a sin, but Vlad knew well from the medal which he always wore about his neck that the church wanted him and Mircea and father to fight huge wars for them. He didn't understand that either, and the worst of it was the no one else seemed to care. Even Mircea who was, after all, twelve years old, and who would one day be voivode, didn't seem to think about anything like that. And Vlad didn't bring it up because Mircea would probably just laugh and Radu would be confused. Besides, such thoughts were safer when kept inside one's own head. Vlad knew that.

The next day was Sunday, and they went to church first thing in the morning, even before breakfast. Mother insisted on such things – she said that one focused best on religion when they were in mild discomfort, hungry or thirsty or cold. It gave us some idea of what Christ suffered for our sins, she said.

Radu was sitting next to her then, as he always did, and Vlad was sitting between Radu and Mircea. Father was supposed to be sitting next to Mircea, but he hadn't gotten there yet, which wasn't much of a surprise – father was often very busy with matters of state, so, even when he was Tirgoviste, he often didn't have the time to join them for church.

It was quite a long service that day, and much of it was in Latin. For some time, Vlad amused himself by translating all the Latin parts, but there were a good many words he didn't know yet, and the parts he could understand weren't all that interesting. So he began examining the holy objects on the altar; the chalice with the communion wine in it, which was made of beaten gold, the holy wafer, half covered the piece of white linen that it was wrapped in. Carefully, he looked for something holy in them, something beyond the ordinary, but the chalice could have been the one his father used at banquets, and the wafer could have been any piece of bread. There was no…_magic _in them.

Surely he was missing something important, something that gave it all meaning, but Vlad was fairly sure that he understood magic, and there was none there. But then how could his mother be so focused every week at services, her eyes pressed shut as tightly as the beads of her rosary were pressed into her palm, making indentations there? He would have thought it something that only adults understood (though, as he grew older, he found that there were, in actuality, very few of those things), but Mircea seemed just as intent, muttering prayers under his breath, and Mircea, despite being older than Vlad, was no more an adult than Vlad was.

Thoughtfully, he added that to his mental list of things to try to understand at some point.


End file.
